Meriwether Lewis and William Clark spent two years and three months working side by side, exploring the newly purchased Louisiana Territory and lands west, from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean. They kept extensive journals of their 1804-1806 expedition, documenting more than 200 plants and animals unknown to Western science and including no fewer than 140 maps of the vast region. They didn’t sign those copious notes, however.

Lewis’ autograph on its own is hard to find, despite his having been one of President Thomas Jefferson’s aides before the expedition and governor of the Louisiana Territory after. Clark served as agent of Indian affairs and general of the territorial militia during Lewis’ governorship. You’d think, therefore, that there would be at least some government documents, land grants or some such, signed by both men squirreled away in some institutional collection, but if there are, we don’t know of them. The Library of Congress doesn’t have any. The American Philosophical Society and Yale University who own some of the original journals don’t have any. Auction records going back 40 years have no record of a double Lewis and Clark autograph being sold.

The combined autographs of Lewis and Clark aren’t the only thing that makes this document important. It was signed on August 3, 1809. Meriwether Lewis died under mysterious circumstances never fully explained on October 11, 1809. A month to the day after he signed Choteau’s land indenture, he left St. Louis on his way to Washington, D.C. to deal with some headaches arising from his questionable administrative choices. The territorial secretary, settlers and local political leaders had all complained to Washington about him and there were rumors that he had misused government funds. He was always slow to communicate with the Jefferson administration and particularly slow to deal with these kinds of allegations. Finally he was forced to deal with things when the federal government refused to pay War Department drafts he had drawn as governor of the Louisiana Territory.

On October 10, he stopped at an inn called Grinder’s Stand on the old Natchez Trace trail near what is today Hohenwald, Tennessee, 70 miles south of Nashville. The next morning before dawn, shots rang out. Servants found Lewis felled by multiple gunshots to his chest and head, including one that took off a chunk of his skull. He lived for a few more hours, dying just after the sun rose. Although nobody claimed to have witnessed the shooting, Lewis’ guide reported that he had committed suicide. The innkeeper’s wife Priscilla Grinder claimed she had seen Lewis behaving strangely the night before and to have observed him alone crawling back to his room after the gunshots woke her up.

It is generally accepted by scholars (and at the time by Thomas Jefferson and William Clark) that he committed suicide, but his family insisted that he was murdered. In any case, the death of Lewis fell so near to the signing of this indenture that William C. Carr, an original witness to the signing, was called upon a second time to attest to the document’s legality. The document was notarized on the verso on January 5, 1810, and reads: “Before me the Subscriber one of the Justices of the peace in and for the township aforesaid – Personally came and appeared William C. Carr Esqre one of the Subscribing witnesses to the within Instrument of writing , who being duly sworn on the Holy Evangelists of Almighty God deposeth & saith that he was present, when Meriwether Lewis signed & sealed & delivered the same as his act & Deed that he the deponent subscribed his name thereto as a witness to the Same as well as William Clark.”

Meriwether Lewis was buried on the spot, today milepost 385.9 of the Natchez Trace Parkway. There was no autopsy. The only doctor to ever examine the body did so in 1848 and he said it appeared Lewis had been murdered. Lewis’ family has been trying since 1993 to have the body exhumed, but the Natchez Trace Parkway is under the purview of the National Park Service, which as a point of policy prohibits exhumations unless the burial is in danger of being damaged by development, park activities or natural forces. As of its most recent ruling in 2010, the Department of the Interior is sticking with the policy and refusing to exhume Lewis’ body.

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I had heard that there were mysterious circumstances surrounding Clark’s death and remembered something about the family’s request for exhumation but never really looked in to it. A quick Google search was completely fruitless. Wikipedia and a host of other sites just list that he died and when and where. One site did say, “after a short illness.” I suppose that if suicide were believed, that might account for some silence on the cause, given the taboo nature of that subject in years past. Still, it’s not even mentioned on the Wikipedia talk page.

Has Clark’s family asked for an exhumation? I think you might be mixing up the two explorers. William Clark died of a “brief illness” in 1838. Meriwether Lewis died of gunshot wounds in 1809.

I was thinking that the suicide theory was accepted quickly and without looking too closely just because Lewis’ friends, Jefferson and Clark included, didn’t want to expose any potentially sordid events. There were rumors that Lewis was an opium addict, and some gossip had it that he was murdered for cavorting with a married woman. I wonder if they just went with the suicide story because it was a dignified way to avoid disgrace, ancient Roman style.

I also think it’s unlikely he would have shot himself in the chest. Even if he failed to kill himself with the first shot to the head, surely he would have tried again instead of aiming for his chest. If he tried his chest first, that would be highly incongruous.

Oddly I’m a descendent of Lewis (Great grand uncle generations back), my great uncle had a letter signed by him to his aunt (our common ancestor). I always wondered what became of that.
My mom had a copy at one time.
My mom thought he had committed suicide, but based on what, I don’t know.